Blame Obama for Dreamers’ dilemma and other comments.

Conservative: Blame Obama for Dems Getting Rolled The government shutdown finally ended when Democrats realized they were fighting “a losing political battle,” says Marc Thiessen at The Washington Post. So who’s to blame for their predicament? Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, of course — but also Barack Obama, “who could have legalized the ‘dreamers’ when...

Time: 17:45&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Date: 23.01.2018

The government shutdown finally ended when Democrats realized they were fighting “a losing political battle,” says Marc Thiessen at The Washington Post. So who’s to blame for their predicament? Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, of course — but also Barack Obama, “who could have legalized the ‘dreamers’ when he had the chance.” Indeed, Democrats back then controlled the House and had a filibuster-proof Senate majority. If Obama “really wanted to pass either the Dream Act or comprehensive immigration reform” — and he’d promised to do so during his first year in office — “Republicans were powerless to stop him. But he didn’t do it.” Instead, he focused on ObamaCare. Had he made immigration a priority, “there would be no immigration impasses today.”
Policy wonk: Trump’s Infrastructure Opportunity

Presidents all “lament America’s decaying infrastructure and promise to improve it” but fail every time, laments City Journal’s John Tierney. But President Trump, he contends, has “a workable strategy: . . . get the federal government out of the way” and “shift responsibility” back to the cities and states that benefit from these projects. If he can pull it off, he could “start undoing the costly mistakes that have left the country with dilapidated bridges, deteriorating transit systems and congested highways.” The goal is to “stimulate grass-roots creativity” with $1 trillion in spending “coming from user fees and local tax dollars, not Washington.” That appalls Democrats who “want to go on showering federal largesse on their union supporters, but it’s the only practical way to . . . force localities to focus on cost-effective projects” instead of pricey boondoggles.
From the right: FDR Knew About Working for Benefits

Given the longtime Democratic creed that Republicans live “to rain pain on the unfortunate,” it’s no surprise, says Noemie Emery at the Washington Examiner, that a GOP proposal that healthy Medicaid recipients give some hours to work or school is being depicted “as slave labor itself.” Yet “it’s the same principle that animated the Homestead Act, the GI Bill of Rights and most New Deal innovations: The idea that things work better when people do things to earn their own benefits.” Only in the ’60s era of Great Society liberalism did “the idea that you ‘gave back’ disappear.” That would have dismayed Franklin Roosevelt, “who detested the ‘dole,’ and all that smacked of it and knew all too well where it led” — what he called “a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”
Education writer: Restoring Confidence in Charters

Mene Ukueberuwa says “it’s no shock that the rise of charter schools has spurred nationwide opposition from teachers’ unions, which are losing their vise grip on salary and benefits negotiations.” But what’s “alarming” is that the anti-charter campaign “may be starting to gain ground.” A new poll shows support for charters “has declined by more than 10 percentage points just in the past year, with the rising doubts spread evenly across party lines.” Reform advocates “should take the news as an urgent call to rebut the slander” and to address “deficient policies that actually have held back their success in some regions.” Because “a quarter century of trials has proved these reformers right, with charter schools producing unmatched benefits for their students in most but not all cases.”
Faith watch: US Christianity Is Growing Stronger

We keep hearing that “religious faith in America is going the way of the Yellow Pages and travel maps” and “it’s just a matter of time until Christianity’s total and happy extinction,” says Glenn Stanton at The Federalist. But new research by Harvard and Indiana University scholars finds that “religion continues to enjoy ‘persistent and exceptional intensity’ in America.” Yes, “mainline churches are tanking” and “hemorrhaging members in startling numbers, but many of those folks are not leaving Christianity. They are simply going elsewhere” to “other, very different kinds of churches.” Fact is, “the percentage of Americans who attend church more than once a week, pray daily and accept the Bible as wholly reliable and deeply instructive to their lives has remained absolutely, steel-bar constant for the last 50 years or more.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann